Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday July 20, 2015 @09:00PM
from the to-the-moon dept.

MarkWhittington writes: The Houston Chronicle reported that NextGen Space LLC has released the results of a study that suggests that if the United States were to choose to do space in some new and creative ways, American moon boots could be on the lunar surface by 2021. The cost from the authorization to the first crewed lunar landing would be just $10 billion. The study was partly funded by NASA and was reviewed by the space agency and commercial space experts.

when they originally announced the SLS and orion, the plan was for 2018 or 2019. but the funding got stripped out.

sadly nasa is the red headed stepchild, it is one of the few government orgs that i actually care about and it gets pennies compared to orgs who want to ensure that some mole that no one has ever heard of remains protected. Its wrong

Just because you have not heard of the animals some groups are attempting to save does not mean you shouldn't care about it. That is pathetic reasoning, and assumes one's knowledge is perfect. Ecosystems are important to us, as we rely on them for pretty much everything, even if it's not immediately obvious. Ecosystems are made up of relationships between sometimes-fragile populations of animals, and an imbalance in one can cause massive repercussions in others, leading to all sorts of problems you should already be aware of if you want to criticize this field. You might be upset in funding a few million here and there to protect various biotopes or species, but I'm sure you'd be even more upset to spend much more on managing the ecology because the animals that did it for free were not known to ganjadude, and so were eradicated by apathy.

The EPA does two things, both of which sound good but are extremely hard to put a dollar value on so saying it's financially sound sounds very categorical. The first is protecting the macro-environment from pollution like NOX (acid rain), CFCs (ozone layer depletion), DDT (cancer) and various other toxins. Potentially huge impacts, but also vastly complicated models riddled with uncertainty in both effects and consequence. Like for example CO2 emissions and AGW, could you put a dollar value per ton? I mean

Why would you rather do Mars? Seriously, what is a manned Mars mission gonna get us?

We already know plenty about Mars, owing to all the probes we've send (and are sending) there. At least two things interest me more than having a one-off manned mission to Mars right now: a space elevator, and a permanent Lunar colony. One would make sending stuff into space drastically cheaper, and the other would begin the permanent expansion of the human race to other worlds (which is just cool in itself IMHO). But a

Yes but you forgot the biggest waste of American tax payer money defense. There is no justifiable threat to the amount of money we have spent on the defense theater since 9/11. If you pumped 10% of what was put into the Department of Defense into NASA over those years who knows the breakthroughs and missions that could have happened.

I propose sending robots first. Once the robots are done constructing a nice moon base and spaceport, we can send some astronauts up to move in to it. (then they can start supervising the Helium-3 mining, the tourists, and of course the low-gravity professional sports)

In today's dollars, a single Saturn V launch was about $20 billion. So now we are saying we can do it for half of that, including all of the research and development? The entire Apollo project was estimated in 2005 dollars as $170 Billion.
I would bet it will cost more like $100 billion including research. A single shot could probably be done for $15 billion.
NASA today doesn't have the budget for this sort of endeavor. In 1966, NASAs budget was $5.2 billion, or in today's dollars, $38.2 billion. Today's actual NASA budget is only $18.3 billion.

The Saturn V was intended to beat the Russians there, not necessarily be cost efficient. This type of mission almost certainly is based on using a commerical crew mission and 1 or 2 additional launches of a service module + propulsion module to go there. Once you're in orbit, after all, it only takes something like an extra 800 ms-1 of delta-V to get to the moon (less if you want to get really tricky about it, but with humans speed is a factor too).

It cost a lot more back then (in relative dollars) because 1) they had never done it before and 2) they didn't have today's technology. We've done it before (though the people involved are all retired or dead, but we still have most of the data), we know how to build better rockets now than we did then, and we have all kinds of other technologies now to keep costs down, whereas back then they had to actually develop lots of new technologies to make it happen. Building rockets and sending people into space

Conservatively, let's say we could earn 2.5% annually in real terms (i.e. after inflation) on $10B. That's the rate the economy is projected to grow at long-term. So, $250M/year in perpetuity. That'd fund a lot of basic research, if that's what you're into.

I'd also feel better about spending $10B on a manned moon mission if the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio wasn't about 70% higher than it was 8 years ago.

Water on the moon is a non-renewable resource. The rest of the world is likely to say "Hey, that belongs to all of us, not just to the nation who first has the technology to extract it."

The article says "Although NASA paid for the $100,000 report it is unlikely to immediately embrace its conclusions." $100,000 is perhaps half an engineer-year of analysis. It may be a good start, but I'd want to be a whole lot more thorough before deciding how to spend tens of billions of dollars.

That isn't just idle speculation either. In the last week or two I was listening to an astronomy podcast about the future of space science. They featured an ethicist who brought up just these points when talking about the proposed asteroid mining companies. He posited as a-priori truth that all of the asteroids belonged to all mankind and no country or company could claim any property rights in space. He had worked out an outline of a licensing scheme to allow some limited exploitation of resources - wi

It's been asked time and again. Why? I mean, we've been there already. We learned that the moon ain't made of cheese and there's also none of that moon-gold lying about that some were hoping for. It's not made of silver as so many alchemists dreamed and it's barely sensible as a staging area for further exploration of the solar system, which would again raise the "why bother" question.

And I have to agree, there is really little, if anything, to be gained directly from going there. Or even establishing a more or less permanent residency on it. Pretty much anything we could probably do there we can already do on the ISS, some of it better (due to microgravity instead of the lower-than-earth gravity of the moon) some worse (since the moon is less affected by Earth's magnetosphere and hence some solar readings could be done better), but in general there are only a few things we can't already do on the ISS.

So why?

The benefits are actually outside the "mundane" fact of us going there. The moon is more a means to an end. One, more tangible, benefit that was already mentioned is that we have seen in the 60s how necessity is the mother of inventions, and how the US wanting to go to the moon caused a lot of rapid development in areas affected by that goal. Rocketry, propulsion, metallurgy, computing, electrical engineering. The list is long and diverse. The US remained on the pinnacle of the world's technology for nearly two decades, mostly due to the advantage it had from this program.

Another, often overlooked but in my opinion at the very least as important, if not even more important, effect was intangible and hard to grasp. It gave the US a huge boost in cohesion internally and status internationally. You may remember that this time of the moonshot was a rather tumultuous time for the US, and the world in general. The 1960s were certainly a decade that could have shook the nation apart. Kennedy assassinated. The civil rights movement fighting for the rights of the black population, with MLK shot as well. And let's not forget about the Vietnam war. Yet when you ask people, no matter the creed, color or origin, they will think back of the 1960s not as a decade of strife and turmoil, but as a great decade where everyone was thinking of great things, where anything was considered possible and where everyone thought that they can make it. After all, hey, if they can land a man on the moon, I can (insert goal in life here).

The reason is to learn how to do it again. Right now the US can't even put astronauts in orbit.

We like to think we *can* but just don't want to. Its a very comforting thought.

Of course if we don't want a future that includes space colonization, then I agree, there is no reason to go. Its nice up here in the trees - we can let someone else climb down and worry about the predators.

The reason is to learn how to do it again. Right now the US can't even put astronauts in orbit.

We like to think we *can* but just don't want to. Its a very comforting thought.

This is part of what I don't get. We were putting people on the moon every 6 months from 1969 to 1972. Now it's described as some huge undertaking, requiring all this money and R&D. I'm not saying it's not a huge undertaking. It's sitting a crew on top of a controlled explosion, hurling them into the void and then steering them across 239,000 miles to the moon. It's a big deal, no doubt. But like I said, we were doing it every 6 months for 3 years with 40-year-old technology and materials. So wha

The important technologies haven't advanced very much - there is little difference between a 2015 rocket engine and a 1965 rocket engine. Also, lots of technical details can be lost, so its expensive to rediscover them.

Space was societal focus in the 60's the best and brightest worked on it. Now it is a niche.

There are places to go as well, we could start moving out into this solar system, and begin the process of building interstellar spacecraft. Generation ships are the way to go to get to other stars, while we continue to work on the possibilities of s

The proposal is to put a small base near a pole, mine water, turn it into fuel, and ship it up to a Langrange point. Outbound ships can refuel on their way to Mars (manned) or elsewhere (robotic). It sounds like a reasonable reason to go to the moon.

There's also some interesting things you could do with science experiments on the moon. Lots of hard vacuum, low gravity and radio silence on the far side.

The Moon is actually a harder test of habitat recycling. Mars has good amounts of CO2 which may be used for oxygen extraction (see the MOXIE [wikipedia.org] experiment). Mars does have a minimal atmosphere (not a complete vacuum) and possibly easily accessible water ice resources.

If we can figure out how to live in orbit or on the Moon for long term, without resupply, then Mars should be a snap.

Note that they ARE working on a lot of self-sufficiency initiatives on the ISS - water recycling and such. Long term this is stuff that needs to be figured out cold for mankind to go anyplace in space. Similar initiatives on the Moon would allow use of the regolith and perhaps water ices for material needs.

We should not go to the moon every generation or so just for the glory of putting more prints in the lunar dust; we should use it as a boot camp to train to go to other, less hostile places in space.

How are you going to get those spinoff benefits and discoveries without actually doing work in space, and just sitting around here and funding social programs? You're not. The Apollo program yielded enormous economic benefits for the US due to the new technologies created; those would not have happened if we just increased teacher pay.

I'm not saying social programs and teacher pay increases shouldn't be done, but if you want actual advancement in technology, you have to actually do things which require that advancement. You can't just wait until all social problems are cured. That isn't going to happen for generations.

why not say "Wow, we have achieved something of real practical benefit, A, which directly impacts billions of people and saves our planet.

Simple, because it's never worked that way before. You can't just invent things without a need for them; it rarely happens. Have you never heard of "necessity is the mother of invention"?

And conversely, it has worked the way I say before, namely with the Apollo program.

No one is going to invent great new technologies while working on social programs.

And finally, why do you think going to the Moon wouldn't have huge benefits at home? If it turns out we can mine resources there, that would be a huge economic boom. Or would you rather that we eliminate the EPA and destroy our environment in the pursuit of mineral resources? You don't think that would have huge economic consequences?

I appreciate it's not a zero sum one-or-the-other game, but there are limited resources we've got,and while $10b may be a drop in the bucket and there is plenty of condemnable waste-- as a parent post notes, it does represent many thousands of lifetimes of american labor and value. So... we've got billions of people on this planet and immeasurable mysteries to be answered and places to be explored and problems to be solved here. I ask not as a bad-faith challenge but as an opportunity to explain to me... why send people to the moon so we can send people to mars so we can send people to (undiscovered?) less hostile places?

The short answer is this...

We have all our eggs in one basket, Earth. Should anything happen to Earth, either from stupid humans or a very large rock hitting us, our whole race could be doomed and thus all that we have done and all that we could be is pointless...

Of course there's good reason to go back to the moon. Having no atmosphere is advantageous for some things (eg solar panels and certain manufacturing processes), its lighter mass means it is easier to launch stuff from, its nearness makes it a nice practice colony, and several more. For example, you could build a railgun style cargo delivery system to deliver raw material into space. Certain future advances (like 3d printing and robotics) could make for a surprisingly small investment to colonize the entire

Living on the surface of an alien planet under hostile conditions is a pretty tricky affair. Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool. A staging area to look at working towards more of space is something we don't have now. Because we fucking well can has always been a marvelous idea.

The problems we need to solve for Mars? We can wok on those problems before having to solve a 2 year travel time with no escape plan.

So when you say "no defensible reason" I say bullshit. There's plenty we could do on the moon which actually is of value, and is entirely defensible. And which actually helps us learn about what we'd do on the surface of Mars. Or any other planetary surface.

Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool.

Not just better telescopes, or even bigger ones. Imagine how big you can make radio telescopes there, and how much more sensitive they'll be with the Moon insulating them from all of the Earth's radio output.

Yeah, that's a great idea. Think I'll trade my spot at the bottom of this gravity well for a different spot at the bottom of a significantly crappier gravity well. You might think "No problem! We'll do it as a penal colony! After they clean the joint up -- kill all the Mars spiders and Mars snakes, us civilized folks will move in!" Wrong! Those prisoners are the base of the hugely profitable prison industry and if you send 'em all off-planet, you greatly increase overall costs while losing all the extra pro

Pretty sure that would pay for itself pretty quickly. Instead of mining near earth asteriods I would think that starting on the moon and then launching from the moon to anywhere else would be the way to go forward.

Helium-3 is available on the Earth. According to wikipedia, plenty of the stuff [wikipedia.org].

Current US industrial consumption of helium-3 is approximately 60,000 liters (approximately 8 kg) per year;[28] cost at auction has typically been approximately $100/liter although increasing demand has raised prices to as much as $2,000/liter in recent years.

sure, and we didnt have the tech to send us to the moon in the 60s...but we did it

So what are you trying to say here? He3 is only useful in a fusion reactor and we don't have a working design. People have been working on one ever since they invented the H-bomb and come up short, we have enough He3 here on earth to experiment/test with. Maybe we should see if we're able to do something useful with it before we spend billions trying to build a moon mining operation?

sure, and we didnt have the tech to send us to the moon in the 60s...but we did it

So what are you trying to say here? He3 is only useful in a fusion reactor and we don't have a working design. People have been working on one ever since they invented the H-bomb and come up short, we have enough He3 here on earth to experiment/test with. Maybe we should see if we're able to do something useful with it before we spend billions trying to build a moon mining operation?

I completely agree with you and it is sad to see this tired old argument every time there is a moon story. There are plenty of good reasons to go to the moon, He3 isn't one of them. There is no reason to even bring up the subject given the numerous other reasons to go to the moon.

A gravity wave detector is disrupted by vibrations, and would benefit from NOT putting humans on the moon. A robotic mission would cost about 1% as much as a manned mission, and would actually be superior for this purpose.

He3 isn't even usable in first-generation nuclear fusion, it's one of the less easy things to fuse. We probably won't even be able to begin using it until 25 years after we do finally get fusion working. Suggesting that He3 is a good reason to go back to the moon right now, especially as the first reason, is the clearest sign of a true space-nutter.

There's enough for medical equipment and it isn't hard to make more (irradiate water to make tritium and let it decay). As for using it for fusion, it is much harder to fuse he3 then what they're currently experimenting with and they can't do it in an energy positive way with deuterium yet. Once we have working fusion reactors, then we can think about getting more he3.

Skipping over the fact we have absolutely no technology to extract this He3 at the minute concentrations on the Moon, what, exactly, are we supposed to *DO* with it? Tell me, what 10 billion$ market is there for He3?

Isn't it for our fusion reactors which will be online in a few years' time?

Why stop at the moon? Let's see if someone can travel around the world in less than 80 days! Let's build a railroad that could stretch all the way from the east coast to the west coast! Let's try to reach the top of Mount Everest!

It doesn't impress me in any way, shape or form to listen to people debate about whether or not we can afford to re-invent 50 year old technology so that we can do the exact same thing.

Build a goddamned space elevator. Or a mass driver. Or let's have some talk about the pr

I want us to go back to the moon as a first step to a permanent moon base. perhaps something similar to the International Space Station, only affixed to the Moon's surface instead of in low Earth orbit. It would be a good training ground for how to deal with living on another world while still being relatively close to Earth. (Mars shouldn't be the first place we try to build a permanently manned base.)

The psychological/inspirational aspect is important, but it's insanity to base an entire space program around that. Building a permanent moon base just as an exercise in "we can do it" is sheer insanity, and the He3 arguments pointedly ignore the lack of demand and cost-effectiveness. You know what happens when we build a moon base? We have a moon base. Until the next financial crisis comes around and congress cuts the funding. Build a giant white elephant and you get a giant white elephant that fiscal con

A moon base would be a good spot to refine low gravity mining techniques that would easily transfer to asteroids. This would kick start orbital construction which is useful if you ever want to get further out than this single rock.

Other than inspire a generation's interest in math, science and engineering?

That was one of the (few) justifications for the ISS. It didn't work. The kids were way more inspired by the robotic missions to Mars, which cost 1% as much, and actually engaged in real science.

Earth orbit is not as inspiring as a person standing on another celestial body. Yes robotic missions are inspiring, but nothing compared to a manned mission. Speaking as someone starting elementary school immediately after Apollo 11.

The Curiosity rover project cost 2.5B, 25% as much as the proposed project.

A human with some tools can do a lot of science. And repair equipment, and deal with unforeseen things, and deal with things in real time, etc. How many rock and soil samples have robots brought bac

If we can make the colony sustainable, it's way past time for us to make a backup.

We either get ourselves to other planets and stay there, or we all die here on our single-planet graveyard.

If we can't make this planet sustainable, then we'd have no hope of making some other colony sustainable. While it's a reasonable goal, realistically, there are countless things that need to happen here on Earth first to make that goal possible.

Then we all stay here and die. I can't fathom why science enthusiasts can't accept what science has been repeating for decades now: there is no place other than Earth for us in the Solar System and we can't reach other systems. You either accept science even when it brings bad news or you don't. There's no middle ground. And science says: there's a whole universe out there for us to see... But only to see.

We do things now that were impossible 100 years ago. You seem to think that we have discovered all about physics that there is to discover and that what was the case yesterday will be the case tomorrow. Science and history have shown both of those views to be incorrect. I think our aspirations should look beyond our current capabilities. After all, it was once thought that ships heavier than water could not float and craft heavier than air could not fly.

How does going to the moon do a better job of lining the corporate pocket than just gutting the NASA budget (and others) and giving a them a tax cut?

That's witling fool like you said about going to the moon the first time. Or are you still clinging to the belief that it didn't happen? Shirley McLaine wants says that's her tree.

This time it's about staying on the moon. Which will likely result in more technological development and scientific discoveries than the first mission. What - you can't think of any results? How did you post arrive here - by pigeon?

Of course the money goes to corporations. Individuals that have the capacity, and capital, to pay for the design of a rocket ship capable of traveling round trip to the moon.would do so under a corporate umbrella anyway. Also, most of the money goes to infrastructure and employees. This isn't corporate welfare like giving money to oil companies that don't need it.

Manned space exploration already has a terrible return on investment compared to unmanned.

100% wrong. Manned space exploration has a much higher return in economic terms. The Apollo missions had huge economic benefits for the US. Unmanned probes do not. Unmanned probes are excellent for gathering scientific data on far-away places, too far for humans to go at this time, but they don't do much for us technologically the way the Apollo missions did. When you have to send humans where no one has gone bef

There are alternative ways to fund research programs for things that benefit humanity, programs that don't necessarily mean spending quite as much cash on steel, rocket fuel, and other consumables. If all you want is technological ROI, landing on the moon (again) is not the best way to get it.

Manned space exploration already has a terrible return on investment compared to unmanned.

[[Citation Needed]]

Seriously - this is a claim that keeps being made, but doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. Sure, robots excel at the mind numbingly boring shit (like recording temperature every thirty seconds) that robots normally excel at... but they suck at pretty much everything else. The amount of ground covered by the three rovers in years of operation was covered by the LRV in mere hours. There's an account in Steven W. Squyres book of them spending two weeks backing and filling to photograph a rock formation the size of a basketball - a task which would have taken an astronaut mere minutes. If you read the transcripts of the Apollo moonwalks, you find again and again where significant finds were made because there were trained human eyes on the spot.

Or, to put it much simpler; robots excel at recording, they're not nearly so good at finding. Humans work faster and are far more flexible.

The famous Chase study estimated that every $1 spent on the Apollo-era space program returned $7 to the economy. Manned space-flight has historically had decent returns, especially if it is in order to achieve something. Floating around the Earth, not so much, but still pretty good.

The Moon is a great place to practice going to Mars, as it has no atmosphere, is close, offers great scientific benefits, and can help further space programs (including to Mars).

You might not know as much about this as you seem to think you do... I don't know much about this at all, and even I can see you're out of your depth!

The amount of money spent on healthcare in the USA was $3.8 trillion in 2014 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/danmunro/2014/02/02/annual-u-s-healthcare-spending-hits-3-8-trillion/), about half of that paid for by government. So $10 billion is about 3/1000 of that. You don't think they can find the 0.3% of the total;for your $10 billion in additional research for cures within the existing medical system greed, fraud, and waste? You have to get it from NASA?